Editorial - Success stories lost in the debate over how to ‘fix' public schools

Thursday

Jun 28, 2012 at 5:47 PM

If the focus of politicians and advocates of taxpayer subsidies for private schools is on what's wrong with public education in North Carolina, a group of young people who graduated from our local school systems earlier this month are shining examples of what is right about our public schools.More than 80 percent of graduates of the Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender county school districts were accepted into a college, university or some other higher education program, according to statistics collected from school guidance counselors. An ad placed by the New Hanover County Schools commending its graduates and top students provoked a double-take and a call to the central office to confirm whether that number was indeed correct. Some 89 percent of New Hanover's 1,571 graduates have been accepted into a two- or four-year program.Those numbers do not include students who have jobs lined up or those who are joining the military. Just as important, local students were awarded more than $17 million in scholarships.We know that not all of these bright young people will attend or graduate from their chosen schools. We know that some will require remedial assistance to succeed, and that is a direct reflection on the high schools as well as college admissions policies.But when the list of New Hanover graduates' post-secondary destinations includes such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, Wake Forest, the U.S. Air Force and Naval academies and the best of the University of North Carolina system, it is clear that our schools manage to provide a high-quality education to many students. In short, while they have considerable room for improvement in some areas, the public schools – at least in this small corner of the state – are succeeding with many students.The advertisement placed in Sunday's StarNews by the New Hanover school district identified more than 100 colleges or universities that have accepted our graduates. Many are community colleges, which serve an important purpose in North Carolina by teaching skills that are needed immediately in the local area. Their role in preparing – and often, retraining – our work force cannot be underestimated.North Carolina also has some of the finest public universities in the nation, in particular UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State, which compete well on a national level. And here in Wilmington, UNCW's marine sciences curriculum ranks among the top programs in the country.To listen to some critics, one might get the mistaken impression that the public schools are a cesspool of failure and require a complete overhaul. There is no denying that the public schools need to do better.But as Hoggard valedictorian Rebecca Spaulding heads to Yale in the fall, and Laney valedictorian and Morehead-Cain scholarship recipient Stephen Cone goes to UNC-Chapel Hill, they will be representatives not of our schools' failures, but their successes.Drive and a willingness to work to reach their goals helped propel these high achievers, and the importance of those characteristics cannot be minimized, nor can the gentle push they no doubt received from caring parents.But they could not have done it without excellent teachers, relevant curriculum and the academic support courtesy of our public school system.

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